The Feeder Project

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the soon to be published Free, is quoted in the December issue of Writer’s Digest:

“I don’t come from the book or media world; I’m trained as a computational physicist,” Anderson says. “We in the software world wrote our code in public. That’s what beta testing is all about. Doing things in public is the norm. I took the habits that were most conventional, just like getting peer reviews in science, and applied it to my books.”

Anderson’s quote reminds me of something I read about Bob Dylan:

Dylan said he needed to practice in front of people. He could not sit in a room by himself and play. For all intents and purposes, Dylan practiced in public. He said that what he was practicing was what he was becoming.

I like that. Blogging is like practicing in public. So is Christianity. What we are is what we will become.

Whether we are writers or musicians or Christians, when the thing is done in public, something special happens.